The Red Men (25 page)

How did I get to Dyad? I must have driven but I didn’t remember the driving. I must have chosen to go but I didn’t remember the choice. I would laugh as soon as it all came back to
me, I was sure of that. This was a blip of urban amnesia, one day deleting the other. Standing on the platform holding a ticket for no good reason. Happens all the time.

‘Did you ever meet some friends of mine?’ I said to The Elk. ‘They’ve had xenotransplants.’

‘Dyad has numerous offices. We treat a lot of people.’

I told him their names. Bruno Bougas and Jonathan Stoker Snr. ‘They both work for Monad,’ I said. ‘Have you heard of Monad?’

‘Of course. Technically speaking, Monad is a competitor to Dyad.’ He tapped my application for a xenopig. ‘Am I going to make a sale here today, or not?’

The more I thought about Bruno Bougas, the more I had a strange feeling that he should be with me. As if I had left him in the car park with the engine running. How would Bougas handle this
transaction? The acquisition of a spare set of organs is a rite of passage to be lined up alongside your first child or your second mortgage. You cannot be considered to be a truly modern adult
until you have contemplated the fact of your own mortality and then decided to invest all your wealth into avoiding it. A gold-wrapped xenopig had displaced the glans-red sports car as the mid-life
crisis investment of choice. How would the management of Monad handle this crucial transaction? If I was to be taken seriously as one of them, considered equal to the Stokers, Morton Eakins, Bruno
Bougas or even Hermes Spence himself, then I would have to demand the privileges and deference they effortlessly assumed.

‘I want to see the manager,’ I said. The Elk shook his head. He wanted to know why. I said I didn’t like his attitude, for want of anything of better.

‘I want to see Leto.’ As soon as I said it, the name tasted familiar.

The Elk stroked the silver rungs sewn into his cheek. He decided to go and see if Leto was free.

Alone in the small office, I found myself doodling the Dyad and the Monad logo. I wondered what The Elk meant about the two companies being competitors. What was the connection between organ
transplants and simulated people? What market did they compete over? If Dyad was a rival to Monad, why had I not heard of it before? One of Monad’s biggest problems was its monopoly. To
survive in the face of a suspicious government, the company went out of its way to pretend it had the problems and concerns of any other corporations, devising products and brands to fit in with
capitalism.

At times like this, I missed Raymond Chase. Since his disappearance, the slow flow of corporate will carried me through long weeks of no thought. Lacking a will of my own, I hosted the urges of
the organization. This happens very easily. You start by controlling your desires, then deferring their gratification and before you know it you’ve lost the ability to want altogether. Other
people want for you. Friends, employers, wives, children. I was a vessel for other people’s longing.

Where was Raymond? Where was I?

I stood up. Anxiety magnetized my concerns and suddenly they all pointed in one direction: EXIT.

In retrospect, I can say that, at this particular moment, my mind realized at some submerged level that it had been duped. My body was really slumped in the back of a limousine, a discarded
puppet draped over a swooning Bruno Bougas. However, the texture of the Dyad was so concrete that I would have gone mad at the revelation that it was in fact illusory. My mind protected me. It kept
me ignorant for my own good, content to send covert messages of concern.

Clouds parted to reveal hot shining fear.

I needed to splash cold water on my face to bring my pulse rate down. My heart was uncertain as to what rhythm it should keep and danced incompetently. My search for a bathroom sent me along
corridors, through fire doors and past empty side offices. When I found one, I applied water to my cheek, eyes, neck and lips. The water was body temperature and did nothing to calm my anxiety.

I became aware of a low regular breathing close by. Quite distinct from my own shallow quick breaths. The inhalation was prolonged, the lungs filling up for over a minute. I counted the duration
of this prodigious intake, much longer than any human breath. I realized that in my panic for water I had completely lost my bearings and arrived at an unfamiliar, deserted wing of the building.
The pastel abstracts of medicinal art had been removed from this place, and replaced by biro tattoos, the Dyad logo drawn with such force that it was a striation in the plaster. When the exhalation
finally came, a long gradual deflation of enormous lungs, I felt the lukewarm, stained air flow around my ankles. It was coming through the gap at the bottom of a pair of double doors. Small
rectangles of glass were set in them, cross-hatched with wire. Not much could be discerned beyond except darkness.

If this experience was to end, then it must end beyond these doors.

They opened onto a windowless corridor of grey-white walls descending into blackness. My eyes slowly adjusted to the silver light. The walls were slick with condensation and covered in more biro
scrawls. The loops, peaks and troughs of ink became more intense as I moved down the corridor. They reminded me of doodles on the inside of an exercise book in which a boy has summoned all the
excitement of a big fight merely by drawing it. The anthropomorphic logos of Monad and Dyad battled against a crude rendering of Liverpool’s cityscape, bystanders on fire fleeing screaming.
The artist alternated dynamic scouring strokes with graphomaniac detail. The narrative of their fight continued all the way down the corridor. Underfoot, the floor tiles were loose, their adhesive
gum solvent in the pervasive damp. Another deep breath began, louder now, coming from somewhere up ahead. As the lungs reached their capacity, the pipes constricted, sounding a resonant note like a
nail file drawn up the length of a bass string. The corridor turned and descended into a chamber, from where I could hear the hubbub of numerous voices. Here the biro scrawl climaxed with the Dyad
strangling the Monad, each of its four hands clutching the throat.

Keeping close to the wall, I inched down a ramp.

The municipal offices of Dyad gave way to a limestone gorge. Here the walls were slick unworked rock. The air was chill and saturated. A crimson light drifted like a Scotch mist beneath bands of
thickening darkness. A fog clung to the centrepiece of the room. Through it, I could just make out the giant outline of a reclining leviathan.

Leto.

Leto’s rib cage relaxed as he slowly let out another breath. His exhalations were so fetid I had to turn my face aside from them. I kept to the back of the chamber, my footsteps deliberate
and silent. The giant was wearing a stained ill-fitting shirt, its hairy lower gut visible where the last button had come away. He was wearing shorts, and his enormous ankles and feet were swollen,
the skin taut and bruised as a rotting aubergine. One flip-flop dangled from its foot, and the other, the size of saloon car, lay on the floor. Leto had a raw drinker’s face with dirty greasy
hair pasted to a flaking scalp, while his lips were chapped with sores the size of frying pans.

It was then that I noticed the giant was sleeping on a colossal park bench.

As he slept, Leto was attended to by numerous men and women, all dressed in the make-do-and-mend uniforms of the Great Refusal, their faces gas-masked against the noxious fumes of their dosser
god. While some applied unguents and balms to the crusty yellow eruptions of his impetigo, others worked to heave cardboard skips of fried chicken and aluminium tankers of psychofuel across the
chamber, leaving them within easy reach of the giant for when he awoke. It was clearly a dangerous job; the bearers froze when the giant lifted a lazy hand to scratch at his flanks, then scurried
as quickly as their load would allow them to put the colossal can of drink within swatting reach. One of the bearers saw me. By now I was helpless with awe, all thoughts of secrecy forgotten in the
face of this terrifying spectacle. The bearer approached me. I fixated upon the proboscis of his old gas mask. The distance between us shortened in stroboscopic leaps until we eyed one another at
arms reach.

Who would scream first?

The bearer removed his gas mask, exposing the sweating gasping face of Bruno Bougas.

‘Is that you?’ he whispered.

‘Yes.’ I nodded.

‘Leto,’ he said, and pointed at the unconscious titan. ‘He’ll wake soon. He’ll need a drink.’

‘They wanted me to buy a xenopig,’ I said. Both of us were operating on the last erg of our faculties. Having become accustomed to the reality of the Dyad, the appearance of Bougas
confused me, for it suggested a further level of existence than merely this office, this chamber, this dosser god.

‘They welcome me as one of them,’ said Bougas. ‘I will become one of them.’

We stood together as the last preparations for Leto’s waking were completed. The leviathan sniffed and snuffled on his way back to life. I expected a long ascent into consciousness. But it
was as abrupt as a switch; suddenly, every cell in Leto’s being craved more alcohol.

The giant’s eyes flicked open. My own eyes closed.

I awoke from the Dyad to find myself slumped across Bruno Bougas’ chest. Morton sat quietly agreeing with the radio. After-images of the Dyad flared in the air around me. Leto’s
abject eyes, two enormous bloodied orbs. The iris a nebula, the pupil a black hole.

Management wanted to talk so they dispatched a screen to wake me; it slithered under the bedroom door then glided on a cushion of air across the floor until it reached the wall
where it stretched out into a large landscape format. The screen flared into life to show first the Monad logo then the face of Hermes Spence. The connection buffered and the sound cut out. It came
back in, then went out again.

The zeal in his blue eyes was back, despite conspicuous polyps along the lower line of his ocular socket. A day’s growth of stubble stretched his pores and there were arid patches of skin
on his forehead, wind-dried by cabin pressure on transatlantic flights. His eyebrows were also parched, sun-bleached during meetings on the range with the Texan investors. When the sound finally
caught up with the image, Spence’s laugh was a mirthless bark, responding to a cruelty whispered off-stage.

‘We were just saying how much we are all looking forward to being brought up to speed on Redtown,’ said Hermes Spence, pacing the boardroom. His jacket was off, the back of his shirt
rumpled with the creases of a long working night.

It was after midnight. I was tired and spoke more carelessly than usual when addressing the board.

‘What can I tell you that you don’t already know? Progress is steady but slow. Morton Eakins is on sick leave. I’ve had to combine his workload with my own. Redtown is behind
schedule. I think we all know that. The project never accounted for this scale of resistance. We sent out writs to the people who signed up but now refuse to be simulated. They’ll be back on
side within the month.’

This was not what Spence wanted to hear. But it was what he expected.

‘We have been making great progress here.’ He gestured at the Monad management sitting behind him. ‘Jonathan has just brought me the most exciting designs for the Redtown
brand.’

Jonathan Stoker Jnr glanced up. His father Stoker Snr was missing from the table. Cut off. Just like that. The gossip was that he had been called to a meeting, only to arrive at an empty office
with a single table. A robot sat behind the table, one hand tapping a bin liner containing his personal effects, the other showing him the door.

His son seemed somewhat relieved.

What crime had Stoker Snr committed to be treated so harshly? I wondered about his fate while Hermes showed me various mock-ups of the Redtown branding, expecting me to react passionately to
sans-serif and dawn pink.

‘This is what we are thinking of for the launch,’ he said. ‘We want your thoughts.’

At such a late hour, my enthusiasm was slow to kindle.

‘You don’t like it?’ he said.

‘I can’t really see it. Could you email it to me and I’ll look at it in the morning?’

‘No. It’s being sent to the printers in fifteen minutes. We want your opinion. Now, now.’ He clicked his fingers twice.

‘It’s great,’ I said.

‘It’s shit,’ he fired back. ‘It’s utter shit. These were rejected months ago. You haven’t even looked at them.’

‘Where are the real designs?’ I asked.

‘They have already been approved. The ads are booked. The marketing is nearly finished. We are all ready. Why aren’t you?’

‘We’re simulating an entire town, Hermes. We’re setting operational and legal precedent every single day.’

‘I don’t hear your excuses with my ears,’ he said, cupping them, ‘I hear you here.’ He karate-chopped his trapezius, the tense muscles of his neck. ‘Your
excuses don’t make it to my brain anymore. They soak into my spine. You are my aches and pains.’

‘Do you want me to resign?’

Hermes laughed.

‘If you resign, you fail. Let me tell what will happen if you fail. You’ll be fired, obviously. We will pursue you in the courts for gross incompetence. We won’t have a leg to
stand on, but we will screw you with legal fees anyway. Take your house, your savings. That goes without saying. Then my red man will use your life data as its litter tray and wipe its arse with
your credit rating. Then there is the question of culpability in the death of Harold Blasebalk. Do you understand?’

‘I need more resources,’ I said.

‘I asked you if you understood.’

‘There is a rival company here called Dyad. I think they are seeding resistance.’

‘I said, do you understand?’

I had lost my sense of who I was or what I was doing. My own purposes had been taken out back and smothered. I could not express my anger. It was huge, a rage as big as the world. If I let it
out it would rip me in two. Hermes watched my internal struggle, his grin reared up as if an invisible rider was pulling on the reins. The spectacle of a man realizing he is not the master of his
own life amused him. I might as well have been on my knees.